LEBANON 2019–2023

Lebanon’s Currency Collapse: The Episode With No Chart

On 17 October 2019, one US dollar still bought 1,507.5 Lebanese pounds — the rate Banque du Liban had posted since 1997. Within weeks banks were capping withdrawals, with no law behind it. Depositors coined a word for what was left: “lollars.” Dollars stuck inside a Lebanese account, worth a fraction of a real one.

We hold no Lebanon money-supply series. Not a stale one, not a partial one — Lebanon carries zero rows in our 185-economy dataset. Lebanon hyperinflation is the search that brings most readers here, and the honest answer starts with what we don’t have: a chart.

One more thing to state before the story, because it shapes every number below. Our own crawl holds no source on Lebanon at all — no cached page, no forum thread, nothing. So this page names the institution behind each figure it uses, and where we could not name one, we cut the figure rather than round it into place. Exactly one number here is ours, computed from two rates the central bank published itself, and we label it where it appears.

What happened to the Lebanese pound

The peg held for 22 years. Then it broke into several rates quoted at once — not one collapse, but a currency with more than one price at the same time. Banque du Liban kept posting 1,507.5 long after banks stopped honoring it for most transactions. In 2021 the same central bank launched Sayrafa, its own exchange platform. Sayrafa quoted a second rate, sitting between the frozen peg and the street.

Each rate below is Banque du Liban’s own published rate, which is why we can name a source for it. The parallel-market rate is the one we leave out. No institution published it, our crawl holds no record of it, and we are not going to quote a street number we cannot point at.

Banque du Liban moved its official rate twice. In February 2023 it went to 15,000, still far under what the street was charging. In February 2024 it went to about 89,500, and the official and market rates finally met for the first time since 2019.

Those two official numbers are enough to size the collapse without quoting anyone’s street rate. A dollar cost 1,507.5 pounds before the break and about 89,500 after it. The pound therefore lost 98.3% of its dollar value across that move — our own arithmetic, from Banque du Liban’s own two rates, not a market estimate.

The “lollars” mechanism — a collapse that ran through the banks

Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany saw their central banks issue dramatically more of their own currency. Lebanon’s collapse started somewhere else: inside the banking sector. Lebanese banks and Banque du Liban had funneled depositors’ dollars into government debt and the central bank’s own balance sheet. When depositors wanted their dollars back, the money wasn’t there to give them.

“Lollars” is the name that stuck. It isn’t a new currency — it’s an informal haircut on existing dollar deposits. Banks capped withdrawals. Where they allowed one at all, they converted it into pounds at a rate far below the market rate. Or they capped the physical dollar amount a depositor could take out in a month. A dollar sitting inside a Lebanese bank account and a dollar in your pocket stopped being interchangeable.

The World Bank named the scale directly, and its title did most of the work. The Spring 2021 edition of its Lebanon Economic Monitor is called “Lebanon Sinking (to the Top 3).” The top three, it explained, means the three most severe financial crises anywhere in the world since the mid-1800s. That is the World Bank’s ranking, not ours, and it is the one external judgment on this page we can point straight at.

Why we can’t chart Lebanon hyperinflation

The Cagan definition (50% per month) is a price statistic, not a money-supply one. It means inflation above 50% in a single monthly reading (Cagan, 1956). We hold no CPI series for any country, Lebanon included. So we can’t say whether Lebanon’s monthly inflation crossed that line, or for how long. Steve Hanke’s Troubled Currencies Project is built for exactly that call. It’s the source to check for the verdict, not us.

Our hub runs ten pages. Three carry our own series end to end — Argentina 1989, Brazil 1990 and Peru 1990. The other seven don’t, and this page is one of them. What separates it from the rest is that every other episode still has a country row to fall back on. Zimbabwe’s series starts in December 2009, just after its episode. Venezuela’s stops in August 2014, just before its own. Both miss the worst year, but both leave a real chart on the page.

Lebanon leaves nothing. No price series, no money-supply series, no country row to link to. It is the weakest data position of any episode we cover, which is why we say so instead of filling the space with a chart that would imply we know more than we do.

Why Lebanon has no row in our dataset

To compare one country’s money supply with another’s, we need one exchange rate we can point at. Lebanon ran several at once, for years. Which one do you convert at? Pick the peg and the figure is fiction. Pick a street rate and you are quoting a number nobody published. That is the condition that breaks a broad-money comparison, and no amount of definitional tidying fixes it. It is a large part of why the IMF series carries no Lebanon entry we can use.

We looked. We found no source we trust enough to chart. A collapse this severe leaving no usable money-supply series is worth saying out loud, not quietly working around.

Where this fits among the episodes we track

Lebanon hyperinflation is the most recent episode in our hyperinflation hub, and the one the “hyperinflation examples” listicles skip most often. It doesn’t fit their shape. The standard examples all come with a prop.

Lebanon has none of that. No single dramatic banknote, no one redenomination date, no central bank visibly running a printing press. Every other episode in this hub links back to its own country page. Lebanon doesn’t have one, because there’s no data to put on it.

A currency collapse usually ends one of four ways: the country dollarizes, adopts a currency board, runs an orthodox stabilization plan, or issues a new currency backed by real fiscal reform. We compare them case by case at how hyperinflation ends. Lebanon’s own path has been informal so far. Daily transactions moved to the US dollar in practice, and the 2024 rate unification followed. Whether it holds is not ours to forecast.

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